Installing Red Hat Linux without Floppy Disks

This is a description of how I installed Red Hat Linux (both 8 and 9)
without floppy disks. It worked for me, so it may also work for you. (I've
also seen it fail on another machine.) No guarantees, though.

I downloaded the ISO images needed for the installed into the root
directory of one of my partitions (for me, /mnt/c, which I
need to remember for the install is /dev/hda1). For
Red Hat 9, these are called shrike-i386-disc1.iso,
shrike-i386-disc2.iso, and
shrike-i386-disc3.iso, and checked the MD5 checksums
against the MD5SUMS file distributed with them, and checked the PGP
signature of the MD5SUMS file.

Since I like to have access to the ISO images after the install, I
made subdirectories of /mnt for them and added them to
/etc/fstab with the following lines:

Then came the fun part, which is to bootstrap the install without a
floppy. I used the following commands (I have a /mnt/tmp
directory for anything unusual that needs to be mounted) to mount the
boot disk and copy the kernel into /boot (being careful not
to overwrite anything that's already there):